You’re completely correct on the exposed demand issue. I would also add that in most cities (in the United States anyway) hotels can only exist in very specific corners of the city due to zoning, often in just three places: downtown (expensive!), the suburbs (so not even in city limits), and “motel alley” (which is usually an old highway in askeevy part of town lined with mid-20th century fleabag accommodations that are slowly being abandoned/bulldozed). For some cities this isn’t an issue, but in others it’s a problem for accessing the tourist attractions, especially if the tourists in question don’t have a rental car. Then there are the non-tourist visitors to consider: if you’re in a city to visit family, you’re probably going to want to stay as close to them as possible. Same with a lot of business travelers. This is a bit of a conundrum when the nearest hotel (or affordable/decent hotel) is a 30 minute drive away.

I’ll check it out, thanks!

All I want to know is: will this push companies to rethink infinite scroll? Like, even to make it a toggleable option.

I really appreciate that Lemmy still has distinct pages. “I’ll stop at the end of this page” is the easiest way to quit a social media session, which is why most companies have eliminated it.

I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).

I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.

I’m not engaged in “guerrilla gardening” myself, but generally it’s recommended to scatter seeds in empty/underutilized lots, along highways, etc rather than parks, trails, and other spaces that are either maintained/monitored or are already wild. So maybe look for somewhere like these:

Good luck!

My list (United States, Pacific Northwest):

Prunella vulgaris (selfheal): can grow interspersed with grass in lawns, ala clover. Small purple flowers. Native to a wide swath of the United States. Produces tiny black seeds that look a little like poppy seeds. Evergreen and perennial in my area (zone 8-9). Appropriate for container/small-space gardening. Apparently has medicinal qualities, hence the name.

Chamerion angustifolium (fireweed): great meadow flower that can grow up to 4-6’ tall. Striking stalks of pink flowers in late summer that bees adore. Produces fluffy wind-blown seeds in autumn that are fun to watch. Dies back completely in autumn and resprouts in the spring. Established patches will grow in size every year. Flowers are edible!

Lupine (all varieties): I’ve grown multiple varieties of lupine, from annuals that were less than a foot tall to perennials that got to be 6+ feet tall (and just as wide!). In my experience, most lupine varieties share the following traits: blue/purple/pink flower spikes in late spring that bumblebees love, they’re a magnets for aphids, which in turn attract ladybugs, they grow very quickly once established (for perennial varieties, starting in the second year), and they produce many (depending on the variety, dozens to thousands) of medium-sized seeds in pea-like pods that are easy to harvest. In my experience they appreciate frequent watering until their long taproot can hit the water table. Cold stratification of seeds does not seem necessary, although I’ve had success with scarification by taking a very sharp knife and slicing a tiny piece out of each seed’s hard outer shell. Evergreen in my area (zone 8-9). Every spring I find lots of volunteer lupine seedlings in my garden from fallen seeds. Present in much of North America, be sure to source seeds for a variety native to your area (they can become highly invasive outside their native range). (Photo is of broadleaf lupine, a west-coast species)

Achillea millefolium (western yarrow): native to a wide swath of the United States and in my experience stupid-easy to grow. It produces pads of tiny white (sometimes pinkish/purplish) flowers that look similar to queen anne’s lace. In my experience the flowers are very long-lived; I’ve had flowers persist into late December! Yarrow seems to mostly attract small flies and wasps (I grow them in an attempt to attract beneficial wasps to my vegetable garden). Mostly evergreen in my area (zone 8-9); temps around 20F seem sufficient to knock them back, but they rebound quickly. I’ve managed to grow them in large containers, although they would probably be happier in the ground.

You’re generally not going to find many native plants in big box stores (or often you’ll find non-native varieties of native plants); online shopping is really your best bet for seeds, and local garden shops (vs national chains) for starts.

For your region, Prunella vulgaris aka selfheal, is a good option for scatter-and-forget. The plants are a little shorter, so they will grow in mowed grass lawns like clover does, although if they’re not mowed they’ll get to about a foot tall (this means they may struggle to survive if planted among tall grasses/shrubs). Each plant produces many seeds each summer, so the seeds are small and plentiful. The purple flowers are small but pretty splashes of color. In my region (PNW) they are evergreen. On the taller side, Chamerion angustifolium aka fireweed, is another easy-grower. It grows 4-6 feet tall and produces stalks of lovely pink flowers that bees absolutely adore, and fun wispy seeds in the autumn. The plants die back entirely every autumn and resprout in the spring, propogated by both root and wind-blown seed. They make lovely clumps that are good along fences or a sunny corner of the yard, and can grow in more crowded meadow-like conditions. My final recommendation for a seed-scattering choice is lupine; there are many lupine varieties so make sure you get the right one for your area. It looks like Lupinus perennis aka sundial lupine is native to most of PA and is a smaller, more manageable variety (some lupine varieties can get to be 6+ feet tall and just as wide!). Bees also love lupine flowers, and lupine are less wild-looking than selfheal or fireweed, in case you have neighbors who care about that kind of thing (lupine are popular garden flowers). My final recommendation is Asclepias syriaca, aka common milkweed. This is a critical plant for monarch butterflies (it’s the only plant the caterpillars can eat), but it has questionable benefit for other insects so don’t plant it in isolation. It also is toxic, so keep it away from where children or pets play. The plants die back in autumn and resprout in the spring. All the above recommended plants produce many seeds every year (and many are perennial or will resprout from established roots) so once they’ve gotten established you should be good to go. I know you said you want to be hands-off, however giving them a little help during their first year will greatly increase success rates; this means clearing away competing vegetation and watering during dry spells (as well as being strategic where you scatter seeds, rather than blindly yeeting them wherever).

In doing this research I stumbled across https://www.keystonewildflowers.com/, which is based in SE PA; I’m sure they have additional recommendations for you!

Generally for toss-the-seeds species I recommend spreading the seeds in the autumn (you can try a few handfuls once a month from August to October) to best simulate what happens in nature. You can also try again in early spring (March and April). Some plants (e.g. milkweed) require a cold cycle before the seeds will sprout, while for others it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Where you sprinkle the seeds makes a big difference; most flowering plants like sunlight, and too much competition from tall grasses/shrubs/trees will prevent growth.

I don’t know of any seed bomb companies per se, but there are numerous plants that I can think of off the top of my head that grow relatively easily from seed, even with minimal care. Can’t give you any specific recommendations without knowing where you live, but in my experience where I live (PNW) fireweed, lupine, yarrow, rabbit brush, milkweed, and selfheal are easy to grow from seed. Miner’s lettuce also grows easily from seed, although I don’t know if it’s beneficial to insects (the leaves are edible, however! Hence the name)

For where to source the seeds, it’s best to find a place as close as possible to where you live. Plant starts are expensive to buy online (cuz shipping) but seeds are usually pretty cheap. Some example companies I’ve bought from before that have expansive native seed catalogues: https://westernnativeseed.com (Colorado), https://klamathsiskiyouseeds.com/ (South-Central Oregon), and http://www.insidepassageseeds.com/ (NW Washington). There are some directories of native seed companies out there, but many are out of date. Best bet is to do an Internet search for [your state] + native seeds and see what pops up, or to search for [desired plant] + seed for sale and select the location closest to you. Most of these companies are passionate and knowledgeable about native plants and may be able to give you curated advice on the easiest-to-grow seeds they carry for your region.

Arcane, the animated Netflix show that was based on League of Legends.

I signed up during the Rexodus, which happened to be a lovely summer day so I was hanging out outside at the time of sign-up. I glanced around my yard looking for inspiration, saw my fireweed patch, and figured that was as good a name as any.

Fireweed is a hardy plant native to much of North America, with beautiful pink flowers that native bees love, and it requires little maintenance once established. It is also edible and has medicinal properties! Please consider planting it (or seed-bombing it in an empty lot) if you live in its native range! More info here

Actually the housing crisis has gotten so bad that I’ve seen quite a number of “handmade houses” sell in my region (US Pacific Northwest). And they’re selling for way more than just land value…

Okay, but even in an efficient system there’s still a waste product. My point wasn’t to compare-and-contrast trade-offs, simply to acknowledge that every form of energy generation has them to some degree. Plus nuclear still requires a mined resource, and again, mining is an environmentally damaging activity. Just because something is better than alternatives that doesn’t give it a free pass.

Obviously I reuse my canning jars, but I still had to go out and purchase my starting stock. At $1.25 a jar it’s not a cheap endeavor to get into.

Barring a major technological breakthrough, all current means of energy generation have significant environmental drawbacks. Even among the “renewable” energy generation there’s problems: hydroelectric destroys river ecosystems, nuclear produces radioactive waste, solar and battery systems require mined materials (and become toxic waste at the end of their lifecycles), wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats annually, etc. Meanwhile rather than solving environmental and climate problems at their sources, we’re relying more heavily on powered solutions, from electric vehicles to de-carbonization systems, while also needing to use more electricity to combat the ill-effects of climate change (e.g. more air conditioning in the face of warming summers). If we’re gonna start turning the boat around on environmental issues we need to dramatically reduce our energy consumption as a society. Instead we’re mining bitcoin and barrelling headfirst into an AI “revolution”…

Agreed, there’s a lot of issues with municipal compost currently. Ensuring cleaner compost output is important for making sure the end product is usable especially for edible crops, but in the meanwhile my understanding is food waste etc produces fewer greenhouse gasses when allowed to decompose via compost rather than in a landfill. Plus using municipal compost has to be better than the farms that are contaminating the soil with PFAS-laden biosolid fertilizer.

I would love to see increased standardization in the food industry limiting the possible sizes and shapes of containers (such as glass) making them easier to wash and reuse as-is. On the home front, for example, it’s ridiculous that I have to go out and purchase brand-new Mason jars for canning instead of being able to reuse a store-bought salsa jar. But more importantly on the commercially-processed food front, standardization would make reuse easier by ensuring that containers do not have to return all the way to their original company; that way a jar used by a raspberry jam company in the Pacific Northwest bought by a customer in Florida could go to a local orange marmalade company for reuse rather than having to travel all the way back to the PNW.

I think should also start seeing a lot more compostable products. We’re already getting there somewhat with paper replacing plastic in shipping, but more products need to be explicitly labeled as compostable, and more municipalities need dedicated compost pickup and processing facilities. It’s insane that we’ve created a soil-to-landfill pipeline for nutrients.

I was not under the impression that glass recycling penciled out (as in, it costs more to recycle than make new). My area crushes “recycled” glass and uses it to cover landfills (which is better than having it inside the landfill, but it still leaves the consumer system).

It could actually go either way, based on the title:

Only half of South Koreans willing to marry; even less [than half] want kids

Or

Only half of South Koreans willing to marry; even fewer [South Koreans] want kids

I’m inclined to lean toward the second. “Even less than half” sounds a lot clunkier than “even fewer South Koreans,” so it’s not surprising other readers assumed the latter.

I have been really disappointed by the times I’ve ordered from a shop online (even one that came highly recommended on forums) that I hadn’t previously visited in person. So now I default to a shop that I stopped by on a trip to Chicago once: https://www.coffeeandtea.com/. They have a good supply of the basics (eg English breakfast tea) that are decent quality and very well priced, perfect for everyday tea. For special occasion teas, I was very impressed by a place in Portland, OR I visited: https://thejasminepearl.com/. A lot more expensive but quality to match.

Nowadays I try to make a habit of stopping by tea shops when visiting new cities, and taking note of which specialty teas each has, their price points, etc. I’ve about five or so that I rotate ordering from at this point.

Do you care about exposure to potentially toxic/carcinogenic materials? Asian (especially Japanese) rice cookers such as Zoujirushi do an excellent job, but AFAIK they all utilize non-stick pots (Teflon).